Rethinking ICT in education'
Carole Steketee
this power point was very thought provoking. I know that my experiences with ICT have been very frustrating (especially what I have just been through in the last 4 weeks with telstra and bigpond) I find that most of the time I just have to bungle my way through. I guess i'm slightly jaundice in my view of whether technology is as important in the clasroom as its being made out to be. I suppose that this is due to my own experience of how difficult its implementation is in the school setting. And then you may face the IT regulations of the school and have access denied when you are least expecting it.
Putting all my shallow concerns out of the way, I feel that if one has sufficent time and understanding of the curriculm, the support to learning that ICT (in all its vast array) brings, is extremely exciting. I can see ways already that I would use it in my own areas of teaching that could help facilitate that deep learning, that metacognition that would provide the students not only with content but a sense of their own place with in the scheme of their own world today. This would take a lot (I mean a heck of a lot) of personal time on the part of the teacher but as I am learning right now (after struggling for hours to get this blog site working for me) the more you spend time the more you learn and have the confidence to do. I feel that the figures that she quotes on effective use of ICT in the classroom are possibly correct, but from what I see many teachers are loaded very heavily out side the classroom with curriculm work, lesson plans, research and a hundred other demands on their very busy lives. I think maybe they don't have time to learn or keep up with all the new advances and programmes, schools could do more to support teachers with staff development days devoted to, teaching teachers how to learn with technology or the syllabus planners providing units already developed in this area.
Upon reflection it is worth the effort, all these areas of higher-order learning, dialogue, discussion and metacognitive thinking and learning will be developed if we incorporate ICT in the everyday classroom. If every school was made to adhere to the "10 ways to encourage wider usage" I feel the fear of, and lack of enthusiasm for ICT would vanish fairly rapidly and students would successfully be engaged. I particularly liked the 4 R's, they are going into my backpack of useful tools. Carole Steketees' article was very understandable and it didn't make me feel like a complete nincompoop, at least she gave me hope to go on and keep trying!